How to Promote a Safe Workplace
Keeping your employees safe throughout the workplace is one of your main responsibilities as an employer. Regardless of if you are the manager of a small retail store or a senior warehouse operations manager, you need to keep on top of all health and safety concerns throughout the workplace.
Promoting safe practices and educating your staff on what to do to keep themselves and fellow workers protected can help create a culture of care and safety awareness. Avoid a ‘laid-back’ and complacent attitude towards risk taking and promote a safety culture with the following:
Conduct Regular Workplace Risk Assessments
Workplace safety 101 involves understanding how to:
- Identify a hazard
- Identify the risk
- Assess the risk
- Control the risk
By completing regular walk-throughs of your business, noting down any possible hazards and risks and following through with a control can help you prevent any major disasters. Engaging in sensible risk management helps to ensure workers and third parties are protected as well as provides a focus on reducing risks and dangers, creating a strong safety culture within your workplace.
Encourage Workers to Voice Concern and Act
Oversight in adequate responses is one of the biggest problems many businesses face. Consider this example of a safety oversight:
Joe walks past a spill in the warehouse but his hands are full. He decides to continue to his final destination and return later to resolve the spill. When he puts his stock down, he is asked to put something else away. He forgets to return to the spill and a few minutes later, co-worker Jill slips in the liquid and breaks her arm.
Educating your staff on simple workplace safety measures such as the hierarchy of control and risk assessment can help to avoid dangerous situations such as these. What Joe should have done was place his goods down and immediately clean the spill or alert someone of the situation. Providing adequate training and stressing the importance of the right action can help to reduce workplace incidents.
Hire Qualified Staff
Choosing to hire staff with qualifications does not guarantee they are proficient in safety measures, but they will most likely have a basic understanding of what is expected. In warehousing and logistics, you want to ensure that you are hiring staff with the right licenses to operate heavy machinery and vehicles. Selecting your workers from warehouse recruitment agencies can help to source the right people for each role. Do not put others at risk by placing an unlicensed driver in control of forklift operations or putting them on a difficult piece of machinery without comprehensive training.
There are many ways that you can encourage a strong focus on risk management and safety within your workplace. While these suggestions are simple and effective, they are merely the tip of the iceberg in promoting a strong safety culture. Ensure your business takes the time to learn and apply all that is necessary for a Health and Safety compliant workplace.